Of Interest

This essay seems to apply just as well to our alma mater as it does to the author’s school:

Even worse than the temporary psychological distortion is… the permanent sense of entitlement the admissions game provides. Winners can plausibly claim they participated in a brutal competition (even if many potential competitors were never told about it). So we owe no one anything. Many of the people I went to school with became doctors, public advocates, television writers who bring laughter to the American people. But most of them became, like my friend who believed that getting into Harvard was the hardest thing in life, investment bankers. We meritocrats have not, generally speaking, used our fantastic test-taking abilities to build a more equitable world. In fact, buoyed by a sense of the fairness of the process, we may have done the reverse.

The journey from Wasp-oriented Ivy admissions to a meritocracy and the off-chance that the journey’s end for some may not have produced more of value, does seem a combination of self-dissatisfaction combined with the satisfied smugness of having done it.

But of far more interest to me in the article was the review of:

THE RUNNER: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue (New Press, $22.95), by David Samuels

An excellent 18th century-title style to describe a modern rogue’s adventures. And with the focus being a revered Ivy school, an interesting extension to DUKE OF DECEPTION by Geoffrey Wolff and THIS BOYS LIFE, A MEMOIR by Tobias Wolff.

The brothers Wolff, while sharing a rogue father, were each raised in separate and quite different circumstances and their journeys
relate an earlier time of admissions and behavior.

FINAL CLUB by Geoffrey Wolff is also an interesting look into the social styles and expectations of the ‘system’ and some of the aftermath. The Princeton described reeks of Fitzgerald and THE RUNNER might be a later-day Gatsby.

As to the doubts expressed by the prescribing writer of the article and the extension by the diagnosing poster to Williams for its part in the admissions process and the graduated results – ‘Physician, heal thyself’.